Linking Developer Experience with Lambda and Smart Pointer Usage

Assessing developer’s experience and proficiency haslong been a tough task for recruiters to tackle properly. Afunctional programming concept known as lambdas has been proven to be an indicator of more experienced developers. Previous existing studies also showed that GitHub repositories with more experienced developers use lambda functions to a greater extent. Previous research raises the question of whether other functional programming concepts such as smart pointers can be a potential indicator of a developer’s experience. To the best of our knowledge, no attempts have been made to link lambda or smart pointer usage to the individual GitHub developer’s experience level. This thesis aims to address this gap and investigate if lambda or smart pointers be linked to an individual developer’s experience level. To achieve this, we propose a new metric called User Repository Experience (URE), which will rank the developers within a repository in different percentiles. We also developed a tool that analyze the commits found in GitHub repositories, locates lambda and smart pointers and links them to the URE metric, this data is then saved to a log file. We designed a second tool that parses the log files and then prints the data in a readable format. The results from this study showed that lambda and smart pointers are both valid and promising indicators of experience, and thus the URE is a potential metric for representing more experienced developers.